Colorado's child protection training academy getting overhaul

Adam Henderson, 33, a new caseworker in child protective services from Larimer County, takes part in an exercise at the New Worker Child Welfare Academy in Parker in May. The state plans to break up the 3-year-old training academy into four regional centers. (Craig F. Walker, The Denver Post)

An academy set up three years ago to train Colorado's child welfare workers will undergo an overhaul in the hopes of improving protection for abused and neglected children, state officials said.

The state suffers from a lack of "consistent training" in key areas and also needs to dramatically improve training of foster parents, caseworkers and managers at all levels of experience, Colorado Department of Human Services executive director Reggie Bicha recently told a key legislative committee.

The state will push forward with a plan to break up the new training academy into four regional centers, devise new curricula and create a rigorous evaluation system to determine what caseworkers are learning. The move, along with other changes, could require additional money beyond the $6.1 million annual budget for child protective training and the academy, Bicha said.

"We're building this ship as we move forward," he said. "2009 was the first time we developed a training academy. We had training before that, but it was not formal and standardized across the state of Colorado."

New vendors to run the revamped training system will probably be selected by April, but the full scope of the changes could take a few years and more money, Bicha told the Joint Budget Committee, which sets priorities on state budget spending that the full legislature considers.

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"We have contracts in place, and we're not satisfied with where those dollars have been spent," Bicha said.

The new regional training centers probably will end up in Larimer, Fremont and Mesa counties, and metro Denver. The hours of classroom training that new workers receive is projected to drop from 22 to 14 days while Web-based and video training will increase.

The academy also will begin training more experienced caseworkers as "coaching pilots," and they will provide over-the-shoulder guidance to newer caseworkers in their county.

One change already has taken place. In October, the state started having county managers, overseen by state officials, look at the 36 on-the-job training tasks new workers must complete before they can handle cases on their own.

"This ongoing expansion of county staff training will ensure that all staff has a common understanding of current law, rule and best practice," according to a briefing document provided by the Colorado Department of Human Services to legislators on the Joint Budget Committee.

The academy, in Parker, was one of the top reforms to the state's child protection system put in place during former Gov. Bill Ritter's administration.

The academy was meant to bolster training for child protection workers by replacing a loose system that mostly delegated training to county officials, who relied on different standards and methods. With the creation of the academy, all new child protective workers in the state took part in a uniform training regimen that required eight weeks of classroom training, Web-based work and on-the-job exercises.

Over the past two years, nearly 4,300 workers have received training at the academy, statistics show.

A recent Denver Post/9News investigation found that despite the creation of the training academy, severe problems persist in the state's child protection system. Colorado is one of nine states that have county-run, state-administered child protection systems.

That investigation found that significant issues with caseworker training remain across Colorado, with caseworkers failing to follow state policy more than half the time in trying to protect children who later ended up dead. The state's own reviews showed caseworkers did not accurately conduct safety assessments or correctly develop safety plans most of the time when investigating allegations of child abuse.

State Sen. Irene Aguilar, a Democrat from Denver, pressed Bicha on another of the investigation's findings when he appeared Monday before the Joint Budget Committee. Aguilar questioned why referrals alleging child abuse have increased dramatically since 2007, while the number of investigations into those allegations has barely budged. Only about half of those referrals actually were investigated.

"Sadly, one of the areas we must improve is being more clear and consistent on the qualifications of the people who accept these calls as well as the criteria that they must use to decide whether or not to screen in a referral," Bicha told her.

He added that specific criteria do exist for when an allegation should move to the investigatory stage, but "what is lacking is consistent training on it across the state, and we're lacking the robustness on it, quality assurance, to ensure it's happening across the state."

Bicha said the state requires no training of child protection supervisors or managers and needs to improve training of foster parents and relatives who agree to take in abused children. Caseworkers investigating abuse allegations also need better training on how to analyze forensic evidence, he said.

The new push to overhaul child protection training in Colorado follows a nearly year-long review by Bicha's agency of the current training academy in Parker that sought the advice of national experts and child protection systems in Florida, Indiana, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Washington and North Carolina. A team of county and state officials also made visits to Ohio and California and reviewed curricula used in Utah.

The state will seek to launch the regional training centers and new curricula this year.

So far, the department has not asked for any more money than the $6.1 million budgeted for child protection training and the academy.

"I notice no suggested increase in the budget for the training academy, and that is making me very nervous," Sen. Linda Newell, a Democrat from Littleton, told Bicha.

Bicha said the department still is considering whether more money will be needed this year. He also told the Joint Budget Committee that his department soon will decide whether to seek a workload study of child protection caseworkers.

"The state has very limited information on caseloads and virtually no information on caseworker turnover," Bicha said. "Both of these things are obligations that counties have to manage, and the state has not historically gathered information or used it in any way to analyze or make strategic decisions. In both areas, we believe we simply have to bridge that gap and begin to gather that information and begin to make more strategic decisions."

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